This site has moved to www.hddsuperclone.com
The PRO Version is now available :)
The Pro version of HDDSuperClone has many abilities of a hardware imager, such as the DeepSpar DDI4. Let’s take a look at it can do.
HDDSuperClone Pro can work with unstable SATA (and PATA) drives by being able to perform soft/hard resets on drives using timeouts, using only the computer hardware. It can also perform power cycles on the drive when it becomes unresponsive. You only need to follow the instructions on the website for what relay to purchase and how to wire it to have power cycle capability.
HDDSuperClone uses a self learning head skipping algorithm to skip around a bad head (or heads) and bad areas of the drive. This has proven to be very effective at getting the data from the good heads/areas first. Hardware imagers can sometimes use special commands on supported drives to map the heads. But many newer drives are not supported yet for this, so then the hardware imager must rely on its limited skip algorithm, which is inferior to the self learning head skipping algorithm of HDDSuperClone.
HDDSuperClone Pro has the ability to work with USB drives using read timeouts and power cycles, similar to the features when working with SATA drives (again, for power cycles you need to refer to the website relay instructions). This can be very useful when working with drives that do not have a SATA connector.
HDDSuperClone Pro can also perform data extraction with the Virtual Driver mode. This presents the live recovery as a virtual disk to the Linux system. A recovery tool such as R-Studio can then read from the virtual disk, which invokes reading through HDDSuperClone, to access the filesystem and target and recover files and folders.
So as you can see, HDDSuperClone Pro can do many of the things that the hardware imagers claim a “software only tool” can’t do. And it is only a fraction of the cost. If you read the user manual carefully, and you are technically capable of understanding how to use a hardware imager properly, you should be able to make it perform just like a hardware imager in the ways described.
Additional PRO Version Features:
* The ability to present the virtual disk with a different logical sector size. This can be useful when working with a disk as SATA that was originally USB, and as USB it reported with a logical sector size of 4096, but as SATA it reports with 512 byte logical sector size. Presenting the disk with its original logical sector size can help with data extraction.
* The ability to clone or image 520 byte-per-sector SAS (SCSI) drives. It can also clone them to a 512 byte-per-sector drive or image file, as desired. You must have a NON-RAID card installed for this operation.
* The ability to perform a quick analysis of the disk, so that you can have an idea of what to expect when attempting recovery.
* The ability to show SMART status for devices that support it.
* Allow a sector size other than 512 bytes.
* Allow using the Block Size option to optimize the handling of bad sectors for Advanced Format drives with 4096 bytes per physical sector.
* The Skip Fast option enables a more aggressive skipping algorithm during phase 1 and 2 to help speed up skipping out of a bad spot or bad head.
* Ability to use the ATA return data to mark bad sectors and improve the amount of good data read during the first 4 phases.